It's the end of the world as you know it – brought to you by a Gnome Mage with big balls of fire

Another week down, not one Frosty

The end of another week of WoW, not that its ever a full week on Oceanic realms anyway, we only get 6 days per week, yet for some reason pay for 7.

Of course this week has been unusual, filled with high drama and not of the guild variety. Mind you, the only drama in my guild these days is when the guild leader /ragequits, which of course means there is no guild.

It was also unusual in the sense that I didn’t pick up one Frost Emblem. No VoA, no Weekly, no ICC, not even a random heroic. Two toons, zero emblems.

Mind you, I haven’t really been in the mood to raid. Not even to take down Internet Dragons. I think in part it’s because I’m tired of the mechanics, they are new and exciting replications of the old ones.

You know immediately what it means when someone says:

Don’t stand in the bad!

The thing is the bad is of a different color this week.

It’s not red

It’s not black

It is green, but a different shade of green.

It’s the shade of green that money is made out of.

Forever more when someone says “don’t stand in the bad”, I will be thinking of a different boss mechanic, the corporate boss mechanic rather than the raid boss mechanic.

I have been playing a bit of Arena. We noted last night it’s a bit like a casino.

We win some, we lose some.

We get an awesome run, then we lose it all.

When the time comes to log off, we won’t until we get one more win. We need to taste that victory.

It was during a couple of matches last night that my friend and I started cursing about our latency. We were sitting on 400-700, good fps, but buttons weren’t firing when we pressed them.

It wasn’t even 3 second instant casts that were killing us, it was complete lack of response.

Press button – nothing.

Press button – nothing.

Press – button – Target not in LoS.

Well at least it registered on the 3rd attempt, even if I couldn’t use it any more.

Which got me thinking about one of the oldest QQ’s in the game – from an Oceanic perspective anyway.

No local servers.

Just in case you didn’t know, those of us in the Oceanic regions don’t have our own servers locally. We play on rebranded US servers. By the time our keypress has hopped it’s way across the Pacific our opponent has gone, we’ve been standing in the bad for too long, the safety dance would be shut down for health and safety reasons.

When we do Frogger, we aim to hit the slime, hopefully that way we will miss it. Of course usually that coincides with one of those rare drops in latency and we are outed for noobs.

The RealID threads over the last few days certainly overshadow any threads previously. But only in size in quantity over a short period of time. I expect for quality of posts the “give us a server of our own” posts probably have more entries, just over several years.

It got to the point that even those that wanted the servers got sick of the QQ. They just gave up. We all gave up.

Why would we care, it’s not like Blizzard would ever suggest they put servers in Australia right?

Except they did.

Back in Alpha, or Alpha Alpha, or Vanilla Alpha – right at the beginning. Of course as time went on people started to accept that it would never happen, it wouldn’t be worth Blizzards time. Who can honestly, hand on heart, say that WoW will last longer than 2 years?

I guess we were standing in the bad.

I guess we believed that Blizzard would follow through.

I guess we thought we mattered to Blizzard.

I guess we should have learned our lesson 5 years ago.

A lesson for Blizzard/Activision.

Banking in Australia is a strange creature. We fundamentally only have 4 banks (the 4 pillars as they are refered to).

Over the years there have been lots of suggestions of collision. Occasionally they prove it, but generally they operate independently, just doing the same thing at the same time.

For years now they have been value adding. By this I mean increasing their value, not so much the services they provide.

Fees were the winner. They were getting more money out of fees than anything else. What kind of fees?

Fees for being overdrawn

Fees for not having enough in your account.

Fees for taking money out

Fees for putting money in

Fees for having a credit card (whether you used it or not)

Overdraft charges for the overdraft you never asked for, never wanted, couldn’t remove, plus of course the fee for being overdrawn.

More fees than you can imagine.

They rarely introduced more than one fee at any time and the info was there in the product disclosure booklet, the 30 pages of fine print they would mail out occasionally, or these days they just stick on the website.

Something changed a while back, one of the banks (just one) did the unthinkable… They removed fees, lots of them.

For some reason their share price didn’t really suffer. Sure there was an initial dip, but then as the news of the extra customers, the increase in mortgage sales etc took off, the shares rose again.

They had more customers, happier customers that brought their friends and businesses with them. Those customers brought their funds with them, which meant greater capital for investment by the bank, which means… (the potential for) greater profits.

Wrong Blue Posts

One of the things I have realized with the ReaIID fiasco is that we, as players, as customers, have been reading the wrong blue posts.

We read the “your talent got nerfed/buffed” posts, but we don’t read the shareholder statements.

We read the exciting new feature blue posts, but we don’t read the boring grey ToS and EULA posts, looking for the word, line, paragraph that has changed.

We accept the changes by virtue of dragging that slider as fast as possible so we can get to the login fields behind it.

Read it? No

Understood it? No

Care about it? About what? Ohhh the conditions under which I have paid my money.

I really hope that Blizzard thinks along the lines of the bank. Happy customers will bring happy customers.

I’m tired of standing in the big bad green, especially since the green seems to get constant buffs and the playing conditions constant nerfs.

Ohhh Blizzard, if you really do want to get the Facebook generation from the Oceanic region, give us some local servers and give us back 1/7 th of our sub.

I’ll settle for the servers of course.

Nothing to Lose, Everything to gain.

On one final note, the Oceanic Server issue is another example of the “White Middleclass Male” ignoring the needs of the less fortunate. Of course in this case we aren’t talking about White Middleclass men, we are talking about US based players on US realms shutting down discussion by Oceanic based players about the need for Oceanic servers.

Those forums were always well trolled, by people with nothing to lose (except a 400ms advantage in PvP) and everything to gain (Raid mates actually know they are standing in the bad!).

Meanwhile, the marginalized (in this case the Oceanic players) don’t just have to get their voice heard by Blizzard, but they have to shout above the noise made by people with no real stake in the issue.

Why is it that human beings can’t be happy with just the happiness of others?

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6 Responses

I swear I read just recently that Blizzard were in negotiations to open a data centre in Singapore. I believe its for Starcraft initially but I’m hoping that they eventually open up Oceanic WoW servers there too.

As much as having wonderful latency and Tuesday nights without maintenance will be good it will be sad to lose the flexibility to play on US servers, especially seeing I plan on taking advantage of that next year.

I am going off memory here, but the local community was given a survey where the choices where concurrent release or wait for servers and choose concurrent release?

Their was also some non-official finger pointing about costs where telstra/bigpond claimed to bending over backwards on costs in response to Blizzards “too expensive”.

But the time to do this has past, any small ping advantage gained would be less then the damage to communities.

As for frosties, its just a natural part of the expansion cycle, I have not run any random heroics for the last 2-3 weeks except for helping out a guildie with a quick queue by using a tank or healer and the number of weeklies/voa’s being spammed is way down.

Speaking as someone who works for an Australian bank, I’m sure it’s only a matter of time until people notice that the bank you mention, the one that has cut a lot of fees, a) has kept the ones that actually generate revenue and b) hasn’t got very good products to start with.

I completely agree about the Oceanic servers – it would be wonderful to have some. I don’t see why we can’t have Oceanic servers that Australian, Asian and American people can ALL use? That way the Oceanic realms can be more geared toward players from that region but we can still have our American friends there as well.

Some fights/boss abilities really expose those raiders with good vs poor latency.

The safety dance (Heigan) is one of them. Defile (Lich King) is another. When we see that the target of Defile was:

(a) a Mage: we rejoice. Hurray for Blink!
(b) a Warlock: we rejoice. Hurray for Demonic Portal/Circles!
(c) one of our raiders from American playing at 3 or 4am in the morning: we rejoice! They’ll be 5 yards further away than anyone else could manage!

I know that I helped campaign somewhere between my first and second year of playing. But then I kind of gave up.

I think I reached a point when the only thing I could do to make my opinion clear to Blizzard was the cancel my subscription (put my money where my mouth is, I spose) and I didn’t want to do that. So I just shut up.